Presuming the next government doesn’t also perceive some political margin to be had in lowering Canadians’ cable bills, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has now finished delivering the major points in the framework that will govern the country’s television landscape for the foreseeable future.

As is generally the case when the CRTC does anything, the average Canadian viewer will not worry much past what it might mean for their cable bill, which is supposed to get cheaper with the “slimming” and pick-and-pay options that will come into effect a year from now. The more relevant issue for the people who actually make television in the country, though, was the slightly earlier announcement that the CRTC will now significantly relax CanCon requirements, particularly for daytime television and specialty cable channels.

The latter was no doubt something of a preemptive strike against full-scale revolt from the cable/internet/production behemoths over the former, which would seem to seriously affect their bottom lines. That’s not guaranteed — there doesn’t appear to be anything stopping companies from putting a serious premium on the channels you actually want, whether or not they’re packaged with stuff you don’t — but it will almost certainly make some of the skipped-over parts of the digital guide significantly less viable: even if overall subscription dollars stay roughly the same, the fact some channels will be reaching significantly fewer homes will likely torpedo ad rates.

The CRTC has painted this as ‘quality over quantity’

The trade-off is that loosening CanCon and other restrictions should make it easier to actually run these channels; now the companies can just buy the cheapest programming to fill the deader hours of their blocks, wherever it may come from.

If that is enough of a bone to keep the telecom giants’ mouths full, though, it also requires some kind of trade-off to the mostly independent production companies — and the directors, writers, camera people, set designers, etc. — that handle the day-to-day making of television in Canada. (Whatever your thoughts on the CRTC, never let it be said that they don’t have one hell of a balancing act to pull off.) That concession comes in the form of overall spending on television production, which is to remain unchanged.

The CRTC has painted that as an emphasis on “quality over quantity,” the idea that the shows that survive will have the resources to compete, or at least get involved with, the increasing global marketplace for television, where it’s increasingly common to have grand-scale series funded by private and public sources from multiple countries. The daytime cable chaff will swept aside so that Canada’s wheat can be bundled with some from the U.K., Belgium and Italy, and broadcast by channels in each of those respective constituencies.

As a good number of TV industry types have pointed out, this isn’t exactly sound logic. Complaining about the quality of television Canada produces is damn near a regulated industry in itself, but whatever you think of our offerings, money is no guarantee of anything in a creative industry, as anyone who sat through Netflix’s Marco Polo will tell you. If anything, limiting the number of productions makes it more likely that the next great writer, actor or director will be missed, or at least insignificantly trained, and that we’ll have to rely more on sheer luck or repatriating people who left to find artists of quality.

(For what it is worth, I don’t know that it’s fair to say that Canada — with a population smaller than California — is hitting significantly below its weight in terms of quality television on a global scale. In the past 30 years, we’ve had a decent number of shows that were critically/professionally lauded — Slings & Arrows, Orphan Black, Kids in the Hall — and popular — Trailer Park Boys, Degrassi, Kenny vs. Spenny — internationally. Even if that number is dwarfed by the entertainment megalith to the south, we’re at least close to similarly sized peers. But that’s a whole other topic.)

Even if the CRTC’s sales job is suspect, it’s not wrong about where television is heading. With people cutting or never picking up cable cords, channels that don’t produce or air unique, popular programs will die. Syndication, long a staple, isn’t likely to compete with the infinite, on-demand library of the Internet, which also offers vastly more entertainment options than just watching old television. Removing restrictions might forestall that to a degree, but encouraging large companies to funnel production money to fewer channels is at least proactive.

At the same time, bigger, more lavish productions might not be a guarantor of quality, but they will probably soon be the primary method of television production, which deserves consideration in a world of limited resources. There is a lot of truth to the apprenticeship argument, that you have to sharpen your knife on smaller shows before killing it on bigger ones, but those options are also expanding with the Internet — which has already begun working as a viable, if difficult, training ground. (The funding that is available will have to start flowing down in that direction, too, although that’s something of a rougher row to hoe in Canada.)

This all isn’t to say that the future of television production in Canada is brighter because of these changes, but it wasn’t rosy before them, for reasons the CRTC — and, for that matter, Canadian television producers — had little to do with. There is assuredly some pain and contraction coming in the next decade; these changes are no balm, but they’re a decent stretch to try to minimize further injury.